USB Floppy Drive

This external floppy drive has a USB interface and supports Win 98/2k and the

iMac OS 8.6 or later. It can read and write the older 3.5" 720 kB floppies,

the more commonly used 1.44 MB floppies, and 1.2 MB NEC and Toshiba floppies. It’s

thin with a silver-grayish coating that gives it a stylish look.

Being USB, installing the drive is no problem. Just plug it in and provide

the drivers, which are given on an accompanying CD. Once installed, you’ll see

a floppy drive icon along with the hard drive and CD-drive icons in My Computer.

To test its performance, we ran three tests on it and compared the results

with an ordinary Sony floppy drive. First, we transferred 1.33 MB of mixed data

comprising 30 files that varied from 1 kB-250 kB in size, and measured the time

taken. The ordinary floppy drive finished the task in 1 min 41sec whereas the

USB floppy took 1 min 35 sec–a marginal difference. We then deleted 1.29 MB of

data from both drives, and measured the time taken. The results were again

similar for both. Our last test, which measured the time taken to fully format a

floppy disk, revealed an interesting result. The ordinary floppy drive took 1

min 41 sec whereas the USB drive needed 40 additional seconds, tagging a time of

2 min 21 sec. So there’s nothing special in the performance of this USB drive.

So, where would the drive find its buyers? It could be very useful for mobile

users. It could also be useful in a place where all ordinary floppy drives have

been removed from computers for security reasons, as in cyber cafés. It could

be pulled out of the cupboard whenever the need arises, and removed from the

system when its work is through. However, where cost is concerned, the drive

loses out in comparison to ordinary ones.

Sachin Makhija at PCQ Labs